Client Stories

“I remember feeling the room turn sideways when he told me,” says Nancy as she recalls being informed of her breast cancer diagnosis last September at Providence’s Southern Oregon Cancer Center. “We’re sitting there talking about chemo treatment schedules for the winter, but I’m just in a state of shock… and it hasn’t even occurred to me yet that I have to drive to these appointments.” Nancy and her husband Bruce live in Brookings, OR, about 120 miles west of Medford where Nancy was soon to begin receiving tri-weekly cancer treatments....

Before the Affordable Care Act, Susan had never really had health insurance. In fact, she says she’d never really had much preventative care at all. “Growing up and then later on as well, we just weren’t real big on western medicine. Going to the doctor was for broken bones. Everything else, you get sick: try adjusting your diet, take these supplements, that sort of thing.” She knew she’d had periodic trouble breathing since she was a kid but had never really investigated the cause behind the symptom. With no primary care doctor, she just made do treating her...

When doctors at OHSU’s Casey Eye Institute removed the pads from Ramon’s eyes following his glaucoma treatment, the first thing he saw was his adult son who had driven him to the visit. It was the first time Ramon had seen his son’s face clearly in several years. “I felt very emotional,” Ramon says, “and to be honest, I cried.” Ramon, who immigrated to the US from Mexico several decades ago, now lives in Tigard with his family where he manages a grocery store. While his vision problems finally began to endanger his job last spring, he sought help at...

“So many beautiful things have happened in my life,” says 71-year-old Marina. Smile on her face, she proudly recalls raising her 4 sons in a hut with a thatched roof in her native Peru. “For money, my husband worked as a driver while I fried chickens for my neighbors. Rain leaked through our roof,” she says, “and I would pray to God, asking for a stronger roof.” When Marina’s husband died in a car accident while their children were still teenagers, her family’s financial situation went from challenging to perilous. Marina saved the little she...

When Vilma walked into the Legacy Good Samaritan emergency room back in 2015, her new husband Carl at her side, she recalls that she felt terrified, and it wasn’t just because she was having an emergency asthma attack and couldn’t breathe. “I can hear the rattle in my chest, but in my head all I’m thinking is, ‘I have no insurance, I have no insurance, how are we going to pay for this when I have no insurance?'” Vilma came to the United States from Costa Rica in 2011 with her husband Carl, a U.S. citizen. The two had met several years prior on one of...